Disneyland

Disneyland

It’s PY’s birthday but we didn’t have any time to celebrate this morning as we were due to be on a train from Wimbledon Chase at 7:30am.  I did give him his Disney-themed birthday card and, what I hope, is a handy portable wireless phone charger. Both of our phones are refusing to charge via cables and, with a long trip looming, some kind of powerbank that works without needing to be connected to the phone might be helpful. It turned out to be very useful all day until we went to bed in the hotel and couldn’t quite figure out how to charge the powerbank and the phone at the same time.

At 8:30am we were at St Pancras international with a bit of time to spare before we were able to join the check-in queue.  We killed some time in a coffee shop buying a breakfast bap, for me, and bagel for PY (although they handed him the wrong bun so he didn’t actually get a bagel). We then wandered to the Eurostar check in.

Our Eurostar seats were using up some points i had from when I travelled regularly with Eurostar to StickyADS offices in Paris.  The points had been used to pay for the first leg of our 2020 holiday but that ended up cancelled due to the European COVID lockdowns. In the end the points were returned to my account with extended validity and we decided to use them on a trip to Disneyland Paris for PY’s birthday.

The security and passport queues are much longer now that there are new checks in place thanks to Brexit. But it moved, albeit slowly.  When we existed the immigration areas we managed to find a seat in a very crowded waiting room.   There are a few trains all leaving around the same time and with the extended passport times more people are left hanging around.   I love travelling with Eurostar but their waiting areas, in London and Paris, are terrible. I don’t remember Brussels well enough.

The journey was swift and more-or-less uneventful.  The train running the direct service to Disneyland had been changed and lots of people issued new seating which ended up causing some confusion on board. We’d been moved from a pair of airline seats to a table of four where we found a couple struggling to get their child to sit still on their laps.  Fortunately, the train was not full and we moved to give us some extra space (and a less disturbed journey) and to give them an extra seat for the little one so that they were less squashed.

Arrival at Marne-la-Vallée, the station for Disneyland Paris was on time. We had booked the Disney Express baggage service which allows you to transfer bags to the hotel from the station, allowing you to go straight into the parks without the need to head to the hotel first.  It was all really efficient and without 20 minutes or so of arriving we were in the Happiest Place on Earth (French version).

Walking down Main Street with the Disney Castle on the horizon really has the effect of transporting you to another world. I find the operation of Disney parks to be fascinating and this is no exception. It’s immaculate, organised and incredibly efficient.  I’d love to know more about the psychology of the queuing system on the attractions because not queuing in a straight line seems to be the rule.

We stared at Phantom Manor but took our first roller coaster on the Indiana Jones Temple of Peril.  I like rollercoasters but I am always nervous when I haven’t done one for a while so I spent time in the queue watching the little cars on the tracks.  It was, of course, fantastic and over in a matter of seconds.

Pirates of the Caribbean, Snow White, Star Tours and Buzz Lightyear Blast were all next.  Then came my favourite roller coaster of all time: Space Mountain (or Hyperspace Mountain as it is now known). This was the first proper roller coaster I went on when we visited, what was then EuroDisney, in 1996 and I don’t think anything has bettered it.

By the time we had left that we were running out of daylight. We headed to our hotel but quickly realised that checking in would take too long and we didn’t want to miss our food.  Although the park is open until 9pm but we had dinner at the Cape Cod Restaurant in one of the resort hotels and so we skipped out of the checking-in line for the 20 minute walk to the other hotel. It was a big seafood buffet that was just the right thing to have after a day in the park. I think PY was relieved that I didn’t mention it was his birthday as there was, at least one other birthday party and this cake-candle-song attention might doesn’t appeal.

By the time we were back we were exhausted. The queue to check-in was nonexistent and ours were, almost, the last bags to be collected from the bag drop. Disney’s Hotel Cheyenne is a frontier-town themed hotel where the (some?) rooms are Toy Story themed with cowboy Woody on the walls.  We hardly had time to noice it, although we did find the hotel chocolate machine,.